TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Monday, July 12, 2010

Choosing Sides in Spain

Congrats to Spain. I’m reminded that a friend of mine was recently falsely labeled a fascist by a leftist, and his one concession to her charge was that he might have picked the opposite side from hers if forced to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

By contrast, he and I have a mutual acquaintance who is ostensibly an admirer of Burkean organic/traditionalist thinking but also likes street brawls, Nietzsche, the Catholic Church, brutalist architecture, folk music, urban planning, labor unions, working-class solidarity, Continental philosophy, anti-bourgeois and anti-individualist thinking, rigid class/gender roles, self-conscious elites, unapologetic regional loyalties, and Carl Schmitt’s insistence that politics requires conjuring and fighting an enemy. So it is almost as if we know Mussolini, even while being horrified by such views, like all good-hearted people who have learned from the nightmares of history.

But speaking of learning from history: perhaps this week of Bastille Day is a good time to contemplate the causes and aims of…revolutions.